During the last few years, social networks have been splintering and it would be a major improvement for social users to have control over their own profile on their own site.

Over 10 years ago, I wrote a post with this title: “There is an Open Source Rival to Facebook: WordPress“. In the last decade, the potential I described hasn’t been realized.

In that post, I walk you though how the ActivityPub plugin works, explore the key features, and see whether this is finally the open source social platform that could gain traction.

The post Sharing My Posts on ActivityPub appeared first on Steve Burge.

Over the last couple of years, that work has introduced me to an exciting new movement of publishers and journalists. Because the movement is so new, I’ve struggled to define it and haven’t seen many other people talking about it.

The solution? I’ve been blogging through it. For about 18 months, I’ve been writing at KinshiPress, featuring these new publishers as I find.

Finally, I think I’m coming to understand this new movement.

For the lack of a better name, I’ve taken to calling them “Kinship publishers.”

This movement started to emerge between 2020 and 2022. I use the term “Kinship” because the defining trait of these publishers is that they build a genuine relationships with their readers.

Here are five key traits shared by the Kinship publishers:

1. They aim to build community, rather than chase clicks.
2. Their coverage is tightly focused one or two subjects or locations.
3. They have range of revenue sources, including subscriptions, ads, donations, and events.
4. Profit is important but not the only key reason for the publisher to exist. Some are businesses and owned by the journalists. Many are non-profits.
5. Most of them build on WordPress because it gives them ownership of their platform.

Examples of Kinship Publishers

I’d recommend checking out publishers such as Block Club Chicago, Honolulu Civic Beat, Mississippi Free Press, Mountain State Spotlight, Defector, and The Narwhal. You’ll find many more here on this site.

Most of the examples I have are from the USA because that’s where I live, but there are similar publishers in Canada, Guatemala, the Philippines, Ukraine, and more.

In the USA, these publishers are supported by organizations such as INN (Institute for Nonprofit News), Newspack, States Newsroom, Lede, Paywall Project, and more.

What’s next?

Now that I have more clarity on this movement, I’m going to write about it more. Join the newsletter or join the Facebook group. I’ll be posting each Friday.

The post I’m Trying to Understand a New Group of Publishers appeared first on Steve Burge.

We first launched TaxoPress because there was a gap in the market. There were no good WordPress plugins to help you organize and categorize your content.

The only existing plugin I could find was called “Tag Groups, which had been created by a developer named Christoph Amthor. This was a really useful plugin that allows you to display and filter content based on taxonomy terms.

A few weeks ago, I was talking with Christoph and he said he was ready to move on from Tag Groups. Christoph published a post with his reasons and some background details.

Since the purchase, we’ve made some key changes to Tag Groups and TaxoPress:

• Moved the Tag Groups plugin to the TaxoPress website. This ended up being a big undertaking. Christoph sold the plugin via the Freemius platform. For European companies, there are some advantages to Freemius, but most of those didn’t apply to us as a US-based company. The code was deeply entangled with Freemius, so we had to rip out a lot of code.
• Launched a new site design here at TaxoPress, using Gutenberg blocks and the Kadence theme.
• Updated all the Tag Groups documentation.
• Added a new demo site for Tag Groups.

This last place is probably the best place to see what Tag Groups can do. You can create Tag Clouds like this one with WooCommerce products:

You can use the Tag Clouds plugin to create a Shuffle Box like this example below:

You can also use the Toggle Post Filter option to create lists of posts like the one in this example:

The post We Acquired the Tag Groups Plugin to Join TaxoPress appeared first on Steve Burge.

1,000 active installs is both a small deal and quite a big deal.

It’s a small deal because it’s only 1,000 installs. This is tiny by WordPress standards. All the plugins we run have many times more installs. Our plugins have over one million installs in total.

However, it’s also quite a big deal for a couple of reasons.

One reason is the WordPress plugin directory is all about active installs. When you pass even a small milestone like 1,000 installs, you get treated a lot better. Passing this milestone made a big different to our search rankings. So users are now more likely to find the plugin if they search for “activity log”. We became one of these week’s biggest climbers according to WP-Rankings.com which tracks WordPress.org search results.

A second reason is that it’s really difficult to grow a SaaS service like Logtivity. It’s taken us 18 months to get to this point. We hit this mark soon after Bertha.ai which launched a little before us. I wrote a little about our ups-and-downs with Logtivity in 2022. I’ve successfully grown a lot of plugins, but growing a SaaS has been much harder. I’m very glad we have finally hit this milestone. Here’s the write up of this milestone on the Logtivity site.

The post Logtivity Reaches 1,000 Active Installs appeared first on Steve Burge.

They asked me five questions for a recent edition.

1. A podcast worth listening to 

Founders is the podcast I’ve listened to most often during the last year. It starts with a simple concept: each week the host reads the biography of an entrepreneur and summarizes the highlights. It’s helped me fill in many gaps in my knowledge of business history, from the story behind car companies Rolls Royce and General Motors to tech companies like Intel and HP. The best episodes inspire me to read the original book, including Swimming Across by Andy Grove which is the most memorable book I’ve read in years.

2. A concept worth understanding 

Radical Candor by Kim Scott has been very helpful when managing people. It helped me understand that I used “Ruinous Empathy” far too often. If you’re like me and naturally shy away from awkward situations, Radical Candor is a very useful concept: “To build strong relationships, you have to Care Personally … and Challenge Directly. Challenging people is often the best way to show you care.”

3. A Twitter account worth following 

I’m going to cheat by naming several related accounts that focus on Gutenberg: Rich Tabor, Birgit Pauli-Haack, Brian Gardner, and Justin Tadlock. If you follow those four people, you’ll be able to keep up with the cutting edge changes in Gutenberg. Their signal-to-noise ratio is incredibly high.

4. An article worth reading 

“Ten Lessons I Learned from Peter Drucker”. The whole of this article is good, but the final item has stuck with me for years: 

“It seems to me you spend a lot of time worrying how you will survive,” said Peter. “You will probably survive.” He continued, “And you seem to spend a lot of energy on the question of how to be successful. But that is the wrong question.” He paused, then like the Zen master thwacking the table with a bamboo stick: “The question is: how to be useful!” 

Too many times, my instinctive mind recoils at the ideas of doing something useful because of the cost, and I have to remind myself of this story.

5. A habit worth forming 

Journaling. I’d often resisted doing this, but a couple of years ago I stumbled on this post by Thomas Griffin from Awesome Motive, and also downloaded the Day One app. Suddenly, things clicked and I was away. Even if you don’t find yourself with anything special to say, just noting down the events of each day has a calming effect. And over the longer term, you start to notice patterns in your life and behavior that just don’t become obvious until they’re written down.

The post WordPress Interview With The Repository appeared first on Steve Burge.

Phase 3 will allow multiple users to interact with WordPress content at the same time. This is the Google Docs experience inside WordPress. Open up a document, click a button and share that document with others. Those with the correct permissions can interact with you in real time, and you can see the amendments they’re making in real-time.

I chatted about Phase 3 with Nathan Wrigley at WPTavern. We talked about why this a necessary update to WordPress, but also why it’s such a difficult feat of engineering.

Update: as Phase 3 gets close, I’ve been writing more on this topic:

• Media Manager Upgrades for WordPress in Gutenberg Phase 3
• PublishPress’ overview of Gutenberg Phase 3.

The post Interview With WPTavern on Gutenberg Phase 3 appeared first on Steve Burge.

One problem that agencies kept talking about was error logs. It’s often very difficult for them to view error logs for WordPress sites. Some hosting companies require you to contact them, and a few days later, they’ll send you the logs!

With Logtivity 2.0, you’ll always have instant access to view the errors, because we host your error logs. I’ve attached a screenshot below:

Hosted error logs are just better. They’re east to find and search. With many hosting companies, the error logs are dumped into one big, messy file. With Logtivity, you can search, filter, and view key information about each error.

You can also get notifications for errors. Logtivity can notify you as soon as an error occurs, allowing you to jump on it as soon as possible rather than waiting for a user to report it. If there’s a Fatal Error that takes your site offline, we’ll send you immediate notifications.

Click here to find out more about Logtivity 2.0.

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Just over three years later, the journey is going strong and we can add an extra zero to the install numbers.

We’ve acquired the popular MetaSlider plugin with over 700,000 installs. The actual transaction took place a few months ago and we’re finally getting around to putting the news out now. In total, our plugins now have over 1 million users.

For more background, WPTavern has a story on the acquisition.

The challenges of scaling up in WordPress

Back in 2019, moving from 1,000 to 100,000 users was a challenge because we were still learning to do things the WordPress way. There are a lot of oddities in the WordPress ecosystem, including the use of SVN on WordPress.org, the Easy Digital Downloads ecosystem, and way the freemium system works.

The popularity of the MetaSlider plugin has been a whole new challenge. Just about everything is more tricky at this scale. There are more edge cases, and they are reported much more quickly. Also, the MetaSlider website is on WooCommerce and it’s the first serious project we’ve run on that platform.

So far, the best solution to all these problems has been to have a good team. Some team members such as Anderson, Valentin, and Kevin have been with us for many years. They make it both fun and possible to take on these new projects.

The post From 1,000 to 1,000,000 WordPress Installs appeared first on Steve Burge.

First was Watchful which is a site maintenance service.

Next was Logtivity which is a monitoring service for WordPress agencies.

This month, we’ve launched RoleUp. This a platform to onboard and offboard users from a lot of WordPress sites. You can see a preview of the RoleUp dashboard in the image below:

Our goal with RoleUp is to solve problems for owners of many WordPress sites. Here are two key problems that RoleUp solves:

• Onboarding: When someone joins your organization, you need to give them access to all your sites.
• Offboarding: When someone leaves, you have to log into every site and remove their accounts.

Over time, we’d like to expand RoleUp to solve other related problems, but with the initial launch we’re focused on onboarding and offboarding users.

Click here to see the full introduction to RoleUp.

The post We launched RoleUp for Onboarding and Offboarding WordPress Users appeared first on Steve Burge.

It’s always been a pain to keep track of them. At least one site every year gets hacked and falls victim to a bad plugin, or some mistake I’ve made.

So I’ve been making full use of the “Global Alerts” we’ve just built at Logtivity.

Logtivity can send you instant email and Slack notifications whenever anything important happens. With “Global Alerts” you can set up these notifications once and use them for all your sites.

For example, I have Logtivity installed on over 50 sites and want to get notified when an Administrator logs in to one of those sites. Some of these sites don’t have content updates for years and should not have anyone logging in. If an Administrator does login, it’s a bad sign and I want to know quickly.

This image below is an example of that Global Alert. As you can see, the set up is pretty straightforward.

This alert is now active across all my sites. Whenever an Administrator logs in to any of my 50 sites, I’ll get a Slack notification that looks like this:

You can see three buttons underneath the alert:

• View/Edit Alert: This will take you to the screen where you can update these alerts.
• View Logs: This button will show you all your logs that match “User Logged In” and “Administrator”.
• View User: This will display all the activity for the user who triggered this alert.

Check out this video guide to Logtivity alerts:

More Examples of Global Alerts

My approach to using these alerts is to set up notifications for anything that might go wrong on my sites.

For example, I can use this feature to get alerts every time a theme filed is edited on one of my sites. This is something that should rarely (if ever) happen on an WordPress site unless it’s in development. In the image below, the Action is “Theme File Edited”.

And this next image shows the alert I’ll get if a theme file is modified.

One more example if new plugin installations. If I have a site set up for a family member, there’s a good chance I do not want them messing with it. Please don’t get installing any random plugins! So I’ve also set up a Global Alert for new plugin installations. This image shows the simple set-up for the alert:

This final image shows the notification that I’ll get in Slack if a family member goes rouge and installs that unwanted carousel slider plugin!

Summary of Global Alerts

Because Logtivity tracks the activity on all your WordPress sites, it can monitor those logs and send you notifications for key events. Last year, we saw a WordPress site get hacked in 38 seconds. We learned from reading the logs and many of those lessons were implemented in this new “Global Alerts” feature.

If you’re curious, this is one part of a series on building Logtivity. Every couple of months, I’ll post more about the progress we’re making. If you’re curious, check out our WordPress activity log at Logtivity.io.

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